A number of authors have theorized that Islamist groups’ social service provision estranges recipients from their governments and acclimates them to activism outside ordinary political processes. This attitudinal shift eventually causes the regime to lose legitimacy and, subsequently, to collapse, ostensibly paving the way for an Islamic state. Popular and media discourse about Islamists’ efforts to cultivate a “parallel state” have buttressed this narrative. In this paper I advance an alternative reading of Islamist social services. Instead of being drivers of alienation and revolution, I suggest that they were a vital component of regime stability in Anwar El-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. I outline two ways this occurred. First, by enlisting voters in support of Islamist candidates, these institutions invested citizens in Egypt’s democratic façade and supported the authoritarian regime’s public narrative of a democratic Egypt. Second, this growing provision of social services came during a dramatic rollback of the state’s welfare net. Far from agents of mass mobilization and revolt, these services actually became an important tool through which the regime defused popular anger and secured a series of cutting economic reforms. In addition to archival and historical materials, to make my case I rely on a survey experiment of 3600 Egyptians testing how exposure to information about Islamic medical facilities effects, and does not effect, feelings of political alienation and perceptions of regime legitimacy. By questioning the popular dichotomy of regime vs. Islamist opposition that pervades study of the Middle East, this paper advances a more complex research agenda dedicated to understanding the varying techniques by which authoritarian regimes stabilize and perpetuate themselves.

State violence and its political effects has been an object of study in other regions, such as Latin America, for decades. Given the repressive characteristics its regimes, it is surprising how little research exists about the use of state violence or violence as politics in the MENA. Certainly, scholars have researched the various states’ coercive apparatuses as well as detailed instances of repression, torture, and security crackdowns. But what if state-initiated violence is processional regime-making affair? At a minimum, state violence is not random nor is it all the same. This paper asks if state violence can serve an instrument for politically engineering new relationships and practices between elites and society while also revealing the state’s weakness? While isolating types of state violence does not singularly explain Egypt’s transition, it can illuminate the relative strength of the state apparatus vis-à-vis society’s contentious politics. This paper’s argument is as follows: When elites oversee a state that exists in equilibrium, state violence is limited so as to maintain existing inequalities against society’s attempts to politically organize. As popular mobilization disrupts the state, elites deploy violence more frequently in a reactive manner to offset the state’s contracting capacity. Not only will elites use state violence that produces a sharp escalation in death tolls, but also violence that tries reconfigure those opposing the state. This paper considers theoretical work about state violence before process tracing the case of Egypt to show how changes in the elites’ deliberate use of patterned state violence reveals an attempt to make a new regressive political regime rather than preserve a past one.

Under what conditions do opposition movements cooperate across ideological cleavages? Why do such opposition alliances collapse or endure over time? I address these questions by comparing alliances between leftist and Islamist opposition parties in Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania. In Tunisia, leftists have joined forces with Islamists on the national-level. In Morocco and Mauritania, such alliances formed and endured in municipalities and labor unions but they collapsed on the national-level. Why do these Arab states, despite their similar culture, demography, and French colonial heritage, have such different histories of left-Islamist alliances? Using a multi-method approach, including over 100 Arabic field interviews and an original dataset, this paper argues that left-Islamist alliances form as a mutual-defense strategy against a threat and endure when both parties have a similar social base – urban, educated social classes. If one of the two parties draws on a rural and illiterate social base, however, it becomes vulnerable to co-optation that causes alliance collapse. When leftists and Islamists had similar social origins and class interests, they were more likely to build enduring opposition alliances. The paper concludes by discussing what these variations in coalition preferences tell us about post-Arab Spring Islamist politics and the types of democracies that they attempt to institutionalize.

Autocracies generally permit less freedom of expression than their democratic counterparts. The constraints on the free flow of information, however, are not fixed by regime type nor are they static within a given regime. One such example is Hosni Mubarak’s presidency in Egypt. During his time in office there were significant shifts in the media environment. In this paper, I explore shifts in the freedoms enjoyed by Egypt’s newspaper industry under Mubarak to explain the sources of this variation. During Mubarak’s presidency there were two periods in which private investors tried to break into the newspaper industry. First, in the 1990s investors incorporated media companies abroad and these companies printed newspapers in Egypt’s “Free Zones,” where many economic regulations did not apply, and sold them in the domestic market. This decade is known for the government’s heavy-handed attempts to curb the behavior of journalists, as a subset of the widespread repression experienced by civil society. By 1998 the Mubarak government closed the loophole that briefly enabled the entry of ‘Egyptian’ papers incorporated abroad. Then, starting in 2003, a new wave of privately-owned newspapers obtained licenses and markedly expanded the number of privately-owned daily and weekly publications available on Egyptian newsstands. Many of these publications gave considerable coverage to events ignored or buried by the state-owned newspapers, including cases of corruption, instances of religious tension and various protests events. I argue that the shifting response of the Mubarak regime to the flow of information can be explained by examining the relationship between the government and economic elites. In both periods examined in Egypt privately-owned newspapers enter the market, yet only in the later when economic elites have entered the government are these papers allowed the space to expand the content of the public sphere. When such an alliance exists, the old guard is less likely to feel threatened by the new outlets its allies establish because it understands that neither group benefits from rapid systemic change. Nonetheless, in such a context, the interests of the investors may be different enough from those of the old guard that the new publications do circulate information, both quantitatively and qualitatively, different from that which was previously available.

The authoritarian regimes of the Arab world are often over-simplified in many respects, with little attention given to within-state variation. In particular, the repressive apparatuses of such states have hardly been examined in detail, and neither has the effect they have on the citizens of these nations. This paper seeks to examine the repressive apparatus of Saudi Arabia, as one of the most influential countries in the Middle East, through a survey experiment targeting Saudi citizens on the effect of the religious police. The religious police in Saudi Arabia are notorious for enforcing the strict rules of behavior posited by the religious establishment, as well as cracking down on questionable activity (such as organizing for cultural or political reasons). The three main regions explored by the survey include Hijaz, Najd, and the Eastern Province. These three provinces are significant both for the size of their populations, as well as their symbolic significance to the Saudi state. Survey results show that not only do the religious police have an effect on repressing public and private expression, but that citizens believe levels of repression vary by region. Those from the Eastern Province found religious police involvement the most intrusive, followed by Najd, and then Hijaz. The hypothesized reason for such variation is explored by examining historical specificities as well as demographic factors of each region.